So why is it so many gay men seem to speak with a lisp?

While you pick up your jaw, let me appease the gods of full disclosure.

I’m writing about a new book by Phillip J. Milano. Though I have no connection with this one, I did write the foreword for Milano’s last book. For this, I was paid zip dollars and zero cents. Frankly, I’d have written it for half as much.

So you may draw your own conclusions about my objectivity or lack of same when I say that, from a garage office in his home near Jacksonville, Fla., Milano, a newspaper editor, is quietly revolutionizing cross-cultural communication.

Or, to put it another way: Does having thicker lips make black people better kissers?

You’ll find lots of questions like that in the aforementioned book, “I Can’t Believe You Asked That!” It’s a compilation of the best postings from Y? The National Forum on People’s Differences, a Web site (www.yforum.com) Milano founded seven years ago.

The site was built on the idea that we are all curious about those people over there who are not like us because of race, religion, gender, class, sexuality or culture. And it’s not necessarily the hot-button issues like gay marriage and affirmative action we want to ask about.

No, we tend to wonder smaller things, like why do they dress that way, how they get their hair like that, and is the strange rumor we heard about them really true. But how to ask such questions without being rude, crude or even sued?

Enter yforum, an ongoing, online exchange that offers a safe place to ask unaskable, even hurtful, questions about communities other than your own. And to get candid answers from members of those selfsame communities. In other words, a place to talk.

Seven years, over 10 million hits and 50,000 postings later, yforum has been recommended and praised by everyone from The New York Times to the Guardian of London to the Helsinki News.

Milano says the early reviews were less auspicious. “Pathetic liberal,” somebody called him. “Dumb-a–” white guy, said somebody else.

Actually, Milano was just a man who had twigged to an inherent flaw of political correctness. Meaning its tendency to stifle the communication it purports to enhance, making people so nervous about saying the wrong thing that they end up saying nothing.

Indeed, shutting up must sometimes seem like a smart move in a nation where the victim hat is always being passed around and people seldom miss an excuse to declare themselves mortally affronted. You learn to keep questions to yourself; cultural difference becomes something polite people do not discuss or even acknowledge.

Which leads to a chain of events as predictable as a chemical reaction: silence to ignorance to prejudice to hate to heaven knows.

Milano believes people are beginning to understand that. When he talks about yforum in public, he says, people seem more engaged than they once did. Milano thinks a terrorist atrocity rooted in a culture many of us find alien may have been a catalyst to encourage us to look beyond labels. As he sees it, we may be ready to break down “the last barrier to improved race and cultural relations: actually talking to one another.”

And who knows? If we manage to demystify all the differences, real and perceived, we might be left with fewer things to argue about. Maybe we would just keep talking.

As dreams go, it’s a noble one.

By the way, and not to keep you hanging: the thing about gay men lisping was called both an unfounded stereotype and a campy act of self-parody by gay men who answered the question. And there seemed to be a narrow consensus that full lips are best for kissing.

Next question: Do white people have a natural inclination toward sexual perversion?

I’ll let you look that one up for yourself.

— Leonard Pitts Jr., winner of the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for commentary, is a columnist for the Miami Herald